I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  “I am not watching another video,” I said.

  We ascended up a winding road. The jeep sloshed through streams and chugged across lava fields, where the green land was dappled with dark, pitted rock, as though something primordial was pushing its way through. Steam rose from the rocks, obscuring the view. I felt like we were journeying into outer space.

  The jeep broke through the steam. The land around us turned silty and dark. I heard a rumbling coming from somewhere underground, like a storm was gathering on the inside of the earth. Smoke hissed from fissures. My sister paused, stared out the windshield.

  “I don’t think we should go any farther,” she said.

  I knew she was right, but still I grabbed at the door handle. I felt ready to jump out, to abandon her a third time, and then I felt ashamed. When she pressed on, I knew she was doing it for me.

  Around the lava fields we must have taken a wrong turn, or missed the turn we were supposed to take, because soon we were bumping along off-road. We stopped to study the map. The earth shuddered again; this time I felt the windows vibrate.

  “Did you hear that?” She spun the jeep back in the direction of the lava fields, knocking us around in our seats.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

  She stomped on the brake, pitching us forward. She rested her head on the wheel.

  “We can’t go back to the rental place,” I said. “Not yet.”

  I had a different destination in mind.

  * * *

  At Volcano House, my sister and I sat in the front row and watched Eyjafjallajökull erupt on the screen. The real was unreachable, so we returned to the image. We were the only people in our row, which made it easy to pretend we were alone. We watched charcoal smoke flood a violet sky. We watched lava shoot through fissures. I imagined the burning heat of the earth.

  At the apex of the Heimaey eruption, the lava sprays were tall as skyscrapers, thunderous. Onyx rock crumbled, as though the mountainsides were shedding, and revealed the red coal beneath. Smoke moved like water over the rises, toward the people escaping in boats. It looked like the earth was in the process of being remade.

  The credits rolled. We did not move from our seats. We did not examine the rocks or buy more vials of ash. We stayed and watched the devastation all over again. My sister’s hand lay on the armrest next to mine. The same long fingers, the same oval nails. And yet. In the morning, we flew home. At JFK, she had to change terminals for her connection, but I wasn’t ready to let her go. I accompanied her onto the AirTrain. She stood, her suitcase wedged between her legs. In the next terminal, I watched an escalator carry her away. The anchor and the spinning top, destined to misunderstand each other. The next time I saw her, she was asleep.

  V. THE CENTER

  “You want us to kill her,” Pat shouts halfway through another meeting with the doctor. He pounds the arms of the chair. Her brain is swelling; her GCS score has fallen further. We are silent on the drive home. At the condo, he throws out the flowers that have wilted, scrubs the vases furiously in the sink, sets them on the kitchen counter to dry. We sit on the floor and share a bottle of wine. Chairs are too civilized for our current state. I want to hide in the bedroom closet, wrapped in my sister’s fine clothes. Overturned on the counter, the two pewter vases look like urns.

  * * *

  At midnight, we go to East End Beach, lit by a pearly moon. We strip naked and swim out into the bay. The worst of winter is over, but still the water is burning cold. Pat catches up to me, takes hold of my wrist. I turn to face him, my legs kicking, and I know in the night he has stopped seeing me. Oh, sloping cheekbones. Oh, lake-water-blue eyes. My skin tightens. My blood cools. I hear the low roar of a faraway boat. I feel the rippling wake. My foot brushes his shin. Who have we become while my sister has been asleep?

  When it’s time to go I can’t find my shoes. They have been swallowed up by the night. I walk back to the condo barefoot, moving a little ahead of Pat, the cold stone stinging. The moon has gotten stuck in a wishbone of cloud.

  I start talking about Iceland. The National Museum and the story about the evil deacon and his tormented fiancée and the Church of Hallgrímur and the tavern that served shark and puffin in little glass jars. My sister thought puffin tasted like chicken livers.

  “I know.” On the empty street his voice echoes. “She told me on the phone.”

  “What did she say about the trip when she got back?” On the sidewalk I track his shadow. “Did she tell you I got lost?”

  “I can’t talk about her right now,” he says.

  * * *

  We go to bed in separate rooms. I stay up watching Eyjafjallajökull on YouTube. It is not the same as seeing it at Volcano House.

  In the ancient times, Icelanders thought an erupting volcano meant the door to the underworld was being opened, that the sprays of lava were souls being dragged down to hell.

  What does a volcano feel like after it erupts?

  I hear a knock. I mute the volume on my laptop. It’s coming from the space right above the headboard. I get on my knees. I press my ear against the wall, my damp hair darkening the paint.

  * * *

  In the morning, Pat wants to bring a conch shell to my sister. At dawn, he went for a walk and found it on the beach. When he looked up, he saw a white church on a distant hill, the spire rising through the trees, an aspect of the landscape he’d never noticed before. In the kitchen, he holds the shell as gently as you would an egg.

  “Go alone this time.” I haven’t showered. I can smell the bay in my hair.

  He looks up at the ceiling. I watch him swallow. Behind him the vases are still on the counter. “I can’t. I can’t stay in the room. Not when it’s just the two of us.” He turns the shell in his hands. “She’s so still. Her skin doesn’t look human. Once I threw up in the trash can. I tried, but I can’t. You know how. I’ve seen you. You talk to her. You know what to say.”

  I slide halfway down the wall. I don’t mention that my topics of conversation are limited to ghosts and volcanoes, that I hadn’t the first idea about what to tell the music therapist.

  “What if I have to leave?” I ask. “What will happen then?”

  “You leave all the time.”

  “But what if I have to leave for longer?”

  He puts down the shell. He shows me his palms. “Don’t leave.”

  My heels sink into the floor. My thighs tremble. I was wrong about the shock, I realize in the kitchen. It has not eased at all. Rather we have entered into a state of shock that will last for the rest of our lives.

  * * *

  We get in the car. We do not talk about the bay. An insistent wind pushes us around on the highway. I think of my sister driving the black rental jeep in Iceland, the shuddering, smoking earth. The shell rests in a cup holder. I do not tell him that last night I spent hours looking at tickets to Iceland. This time it will not be the season of endless sun. This time I will not go on a tour. At the airport I will get in a taxi and plead for a volcano. And what will stop me from diving right into the center?

  Pat misses the exit for Augusta. He keeps driving. North. “You’re going the wrong way,” I tell him, but he doesn’t answer. I smack the dashboard. I tell him to pull over, let me out, my sister is waiting, Iceland is waiting. He squeezes the steering wheel and accelerates.

  We end up on Route 1, the same road John Evans drove down after he shot my sister and sixteen other people in the woods. The road curves along the coast. The car slows. I can see the water. The white clouds hovering on the horizon look like mountains. The shell rattles in the cup holder.

  “Where are you taking us?” I ask. “Canada?”

  He cracks his window, lets in a little air.

  We end up at Gardner Lake, near Machias. From the small parking lot, I can see the dark velvet of lake water between the trees. We put down the windows. Pat opens the sunroof. I recline my seat and watch the gliding clouds. I smell the same rot that I once smelled o
n a street corner in Reykjavik, with my sister.

  “Were you happy?” I ask, hands crossed over my chest. I never knew what to make of their married life. They met in college. They were in optometry and real estate. They went on vacation once a year. They had their own language of jokes and insults. They still held hands. I always told myself theirs was a life I could never want.

  “Happy enough.”

  “Is there such a thing as enough?” I think of my sister talking in her sleep. What chance did she feel like she missed?

  “Yes,” Pat says. “There is.”

  * * *

  I see her still body under the white sheets. The fluttering eyelashes. The skin as waxy as polished fruit. If you feel the back of her head, push your fingers through her hair, you can touch the place where the bullet burst in. The sound machine is on. Her room is oceanic. “I’ll do better,” I hear myself telling her. “Come back.”

  * * *

  Pat picks up the shell. The outside is rough, but the interior has a beautiful pink sheen. I suspect he can sense me preparing to gather myself up, to move on like a storm. In this car he is hoping for a miracle. He tells me to sit up. He presses the conch against my ear, and I hear a dull echo. I imagine that echo growing into a roar and that roar filling me up or drowning me, I can’t be sure what’s going to happen.

  He keeps the shell against my ear.

  He says, “Do you hear it?”

  He says, “The sea.”

  FRIENDS

  Sarah had moved to a city of medium size, the worst size for making friends. A place is a place, she’d told herself upon arriving, but she had never before lived in a city of medium size. People were moderately friendly. The streets were moderately busy, the shops moderately expensive and moderately good-looking. She lived near a park with cannons and an American flag, the most patriotic park she’d ever seen. Beyond the park lay train tracks and a river of moderate width, slicing through the city like a silver vein.

  Sarah was not a friendless person. She had plenty of friends, from cities large and small. In fact, some of these friends had offered to set her up with people they knew in this medium-size city. The site of her first friend date was a restaurant trying very hard to look like it belonged to someplace larger. Through a tall window Sarah spotted the prospective friend siting at the bar. She was sporty-beautiful, the kind of woman who could be glamorous in sweats because everything was of such fine quality. Sarah disliked her on sight. On the street she sent a text. Sorry! Food poisoning! The prospective friend texted back right away, with sympathy, and Sarah never replied.

  On her second attempted friend date, Sarah, after two beers, started talking about her mother. Her mother had visited recently and insisted on staying in a hotel. It did not matter that Sarah, for the first time in her life, had rented an apartment with a guest room. It did not matter that she had promised to clean the bathroom and stock the fridge. Her mother had said that she did not feel safe staying with Sarah. Her own mother had said this! The bar was communist-themed. The second prospective friend shredded a cocktail napkin as Sarah rambled on, a mural of Lenin peering over her shoulder. Sarah went to the bathroom and when she returned, the friend made a hurried excuse about having forgotten to feed her cat, paid her share, and left.

  The third friend suggested meeting in a park, this one neutral on the subject of patriotism. Odd, since they were getting together after work, and it was early spring and still cold, but then again she hadn’t had much luck in indoor spaces. Aided by the small flashlight on her keychain, Sarah found this woman, Holly, sitting on a bench in a black gabardine trench coat.

  “You found me,” Holly said. “That’s a good sign.”

  A sign of what exactly Sarah did not think to ask.

  Before long she was once again recounting the story about her mother’s visit. She knew this was off-putting to strangers but could not help herself—did not want to help herself, perhaps. Holly didn’t leave or change the subject. Instead she said, “I can see your mother’s side of things.”

  “You’ve never met my mother,” Sarah said. “You don’t know anything about us.”

  “All I need to know is what’s right in front of me,” Holly said with a shrug.

  Sarah wanted to argue, but when she went to compile evidence to demonstrate that she was indeed a person others could feel safe with, she came up very short.

  She and Holly continued seeing each other, always outside and always at night. They played tennis at the courts by the library. They went for long runs along the river. By May Sarah had lost five pounds. “You’re the perfect friend,” Holly said once, in the moonlight. The statement struck Sarah as half-finished, like there was another piece Holly was holding back, but compliments rarely befell her and it felt ungracious to push for more.

  One Saturday morning, Holly sent a text asking if Sarah wanted to meet at the train station. Up for an adventure? Sarah was pleased; spending time in the daylight seemed like a friend-promotion. On platform 6, she found Holly leaning against a concrete pillar in her trench, holding a round case by its Lucite handle. Sarah realized that she had been mistaken about the color of the trench—in the daytime it was not black and yet the exact color was hard to pin down, somewhere between eggplant and plum.

  “I got us two tickets.” She passed one to Sarah. The destination had been blotted out with black marker. Holly gave Sarah the window seat, and as the train chugged away from the medium-size city she pressed her palms to the glass and thought of the tiny cacti lined up in her windowsill—the plants favored by people who did not know how to take care of anything.

  They rolled past Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore. They drank watery coffee and ate Babybels. When Sarah asked after their destination, Holly just said, “We have a ways to go.” By the time they hit D.C. the sun was melting across the sky, bright and shapeless. Holly made another trip to the café car, and returned carrying a cardboard tray packed with little red wines and hummus cups. She handed the tray to Sarah and collected the round case. She said it was time to go to the roomette.

  “This is an overnight?” Sarah said, frowning. She was not prepared to spend the night, on a train or anywhere else.

  “We have a ways to go,” Holly said again.

  The roomette held bunk beds and the smallest toilet Sarah had ever seen. She sat on the bottom bunk. Holly joined her, unscrewed a little wine, and handed Sarah the bottle.

  “That city was not of a good size,” Holly said. “The people who built it should have stopped sooner or made more.”

  Sarah was troubled by the past tense, as though the city had ceased to exist upon their departure. She took a long drink.

  “I was starting to get used to it,” Sarah said, her throat burning a little. “The city seemed bigger at night.”

  “You won’t miss it much,” Holly replied.

  The train swayed. Sarah felt the wine slosh in her stomach. “Are you kidnapping me?”

  “Do you see a gun? Can a friend kidnap a friend?” Holly laughed and slugged her in the shoulder. “Seriously, though, I can’t start over in a new place without a friend. Can you imagine?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “I can.”

  “You, my dear, are a cautionary tale.” Holly loosened the belt on her trench and opened the round case, which was much deeper than it had appeared from the outside. She passed Sarah a set of thin white cotton pajamas, a travel-size toothbrush and toothpaste balanced on top.

  “I should call my mother.” By then the land around the tracks had gone dark and Sarah had killed the bottle.

  “Forget about your mother,” Holly said. “She doesn’t want to hear from you.”

  In Hamlet, North Carolina, they climbed into the bunk beds. Sarah took the top, the ceiling so close she felt as though she’d been sealed inside a carapace. A little while later Holly’s voice floated up from the floor.

  “So what happened with your mother? I have my ideas, but I’d like to hear about it in your own words.”
>
  That winter, Sarah had moved in with her mother to help her recover from an operation, serious and invasive, and this arrangement had brought out the worst in both of them. Her mother had a little silver bell she rang every two minutes. All the ways Sarah tried to help were wrong. She got the wrong things at the grocery. She always forgot to refill the bedside water glass. She left the TV remote out of reach. One afternoon she locked her mother’s door from the outside. She listened to the chiming bell. After thirty minutes, she unlocked the door. She claimed to have been out of earshot in the backyard, but they both knew. The next day she left a sandwich and a half glass of water at her mother’s bedside, locked up, and went to see a movie.

  “Let’s just say things did not improve from there.” Sarah thought it was close to midnight, though she couldn’t be sure because her watch had stopped ticking in Cary. Her phone had died too, and none of the chargers in the roomette were working.

  “Am I a terrible person?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes,” Holly said. “That’s what makes you perfect.”

  Sarah asked Holly if she had brought a friend with her to the medium-size city—and, if so, what had become of this person. In response, Holly began to snore loudly.

  Sarah supposed she would get her answer soon enough.

  Next door a toilet flushed. Someone was having a sneezing fit. When she tried to remember the friend who had set her up with Holly, she failed to summon a name. But surely this person existed—otherwise how would they have found each other? She imagined this friend in the roomette next door, whispering through an air vent.

  The next stop was called—Denmark, South Carolina.

  Sarah rolled toward the wall. She listened for the voice of her friend, who she hoped would explain that while Holly had strange ideas about what constituted adventure she was really quite harmless. But that was not the voice she heard. Instead it was her mother, saying something about a bell.